By Robert Scott

All writers in Op Ed are here to inform and acknowledge issues of importance to our communities, however these writings represent the views and opinions of the authors and not necessarily of The Advertiser.

In his play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare has Mark Antony famously saying of the recently
assassinated leader, “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interrèd with their bones. So
let it be with Caesar.” And then Antony gives an oration designed to do precisely the opposite: to incite
the crowd to remember the good and, importantly, to go after those who opposed Caesar,
notwithstanding that evil.

It is arguable whether Caesar deserved assassination; that argument has been staged and
restaged for over two thousand years. Not so with Charlie Kirk. He did not deserve assassination; in a
liberal republic such as ours, nobody does. Although not a leader of his country as was Julius Caesar,
Charlie was like him in taking a number of public stances that helped to erode the republic he purported
to support. Charlie Kirk made frequent, negative comments about people simply because they were
Jewish, gay, transgender, or Black. These are among the stances he publicly took, unfortunately with
some success. He supported a version of Christianity that states “God’s perfect law … [says gay people]
shall be stoned to death.” He characterized the Civil Rights Act as “a huge mistake.” To Charlie, the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. was “an awful person.” He minimized the assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Pau
Pelosi and suggested someone should bail that assailant out of jail. He tried to tie Minnesota Governor
and recent vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz to the political assassination of Walz’s close friend,
Minnesota state senator Melissa Hortman. And, ironically if not prophetically, he said in 2023 “I think it’s
worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the
Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” Now Charlie himself has become the victim
in one of those deaths.

President Donald Trump this past week blamed “radical-left political violence” for Mr. Kirk’s
death and vowed to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and other
political violence, including the organizations that fund and support it, as well as those who go after our
judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.” But, as stated in
a recent column by former United States attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, Utah native
Joyce Vance (no relation to the Vice President), “There is a floor here below which our country cannot
maintained. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” When Kirk was assassinated, she rightly
described people making statements similar to Donald Trump’s as making “their hypocrisy bare when
they condemn attacks on Trump and tonight’s violent murder of Charlie Kirk, but not on people who
they don’t consider part of their tribe.”

We now know about the 22-year-old who killed Charlie Kirk. Like the members of the mob who
stormed the Capitol on January 6 th , he embarked on a personal mission to support his version of
America, and to do so violently. When I was in high school, one of the sentences assigned to those
learning to type was “Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their party.” No, it isn’t.
We all need to come to the aid not of our party but of our country, to find out not only what motivates
individuals to go off the political deep end, but also how they can so easily and so frequently find the
means and opportunities to do so. We need emphatically to require our political leaders, whether
liberal, conservative, or middle-of-the-road, to fix this. Our future literally depends on it.